Strike a Pose

With wrecked cars and motorcycles beside her and deafening fans blowing leaves, trash and rain onto her designer gown, model Amber Valletta remains composed for acclaimed fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh.

From beneath an umbrella held aloft by an assistant, Lindbergh captures the beauty of the damp, littered scene. Lindbergh staged the apocalyptic tableau for Italian Vogue last weekend at Paramount Studios’ New York backlot, one of his favorite places to work.

He comes to Los Angeles half a dozen times a year, often setting his shoots in the gritty environs of the city’s downtown.

Downtown Los Angeles is fascinating, he said, because “it doesn’t look like America. It’s not Los Angeles, and it’s not New York. I fantasize that it’s Buenos Aires.”

Several L.A. and California locations appear in his book, “Peter Lindbergh” (Assouline, $90).

The man who “creates” supermodels and lives in scenic Paris prefers gritty, barren or industrial locations such as dry lake beds, or downtown’s Hotel Frontier on West 5th Street, or a nearby truckers’ bar. The contrast of beauty and blight is a familiar theme in his work, the result of a youth spent straddling pastoral fields and industrial squalor on both sides of Germany’s Ruhr River. But his preferences also grow out of vast experience with locations around the world.

“In Paris, I’m bored. I’ve been everywhere. It’s done, no?” said Lindbergh on Monday on a rare day off at his Sunset Marquis hotel villa.

Lindbergh and his crew are recovering from the day’s earlier drenching, preparing for yet another month of international travel, which he calls “a little circus traveling everywhere together.”

This month alone, he’ll shuttle between Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, Great Britain, the French towns of Arles and Marseilles and back to Los Angeles for a Vanity Fair shoot with hardly a day of rest between. He doesn’t get jet lag, he said, because his system doesn’t really know what day or time zone it’s in.

“Three months is the maximum you can hold up like this,” said Lindbergh, who turns 55 this month. His schedule, he said, is “total craziness. I hope I have a mild heart attack that forces me to work a little less,” he said, in jest.

He works at an astonishing pace. A 2-inch high stack of proof sheets from an earlier job with the model Giselle was shot in one eight-hour day. He’ll edit that job, rearrange the schedule of the next day’s celebrity shoot, select three dozen pictures from hundreds at the Paramount set and land in Paris before 24 hours are up.

And he’s become a celebrity himself. Documentary film crews have followed Lindbergh around for months. Magazines offer to buy him apartments and guarantee the use of the Concorde in his contracts. Italian Vogue gives him 30-plus pages for a single layout. Museums display his work to record crowds.

The pressure could easily poison his work, but the opposite happens, his crew says.

“Peter is just really fun and easy and sweet,” Valletta said.

To remain grounded, Lindbergh tries to incorporate his three sons into his work. Simon, 13, sometimes follows his father during school vacations. Benjamin, 18, works with his father’s crew, but it’s 16-year-old Jeremy who shows the most interest in photography so far.

Though it’s clear Lindbergh likes the perks his talent has brought--the villas, the travel, the attention, he retains a certain modesty about the work: “It feels like a lot of fuss for not much. I just do fashion photos.”

Valli Herman-Cohen can be reached at Valli.Herman-Cohen@latimes.com.